Among the Thugs

by Bill Buford

  And then something in me sagged. I watched the Canadian. He still hadn’t got the point—he was taking out his guitar to show Mutton-chops what he could do—and I slapped the old man on the back and said that I was off: maybe I would see him later. I had had enough. In a few more moments Mutton-chops would be asking about how to get on television.

  I wandered round.

  Yes, I probably should have stayed in England, except I could see that something unusual was emerging. As it got closer to six o’clock, there was what the supporters described as an ‘atmosphere’. In my notebook, I wrote: ‘Five forty-five and the atmosphere is charged and surprisingly ominous. Something is going to happen.’

  ONE OF THE reasons I have written this book as a series of narratives is because narrative is best suited to represent what I regard as the most important feature of a crowd—as it exists in time. It is also the most neglected. I have already discussed how a violent crowd is represented rarely by its members but by its victims—the witnesses who become fully aware of its existence only when they are threatened by it. These are snap-shot moments, invariably the very moments when a crowd is at its most frenzied, its ‘leaders’ at their most prominent, the conduct of both at their most ostensibly irrational. But so much of the nature of the crowd and its mechanisms of behaviour is, as I have also tried to show, determined before these snap-shot moments, before a crowd is dangerous or conspicuous enough for people outside it to take notice.

  A crowd can never be formed against its will, and it is the great fallacy about the crowd that it can be: this is the leadership fallacy, the rabble-ready-to-be-roused theory. A crowd needs leading and uses leaders, but comes into existence by a series of essential choices made by its members. Mutton-chops may have proffered himself as a leader, but it would be for the crowd to decide. Or put another way: a crowd creates the leaders who create the crowd.

  I was not overjoyed to be in Cagliari. It was a last-minute, expensive trip, and, in the most cynical spirit possible, I wanted something to happen quickly, so that I could watch it, write about it in my notebook and go home. I was there because I couldn’t stand not to be. And that was all. I had little idea that I was about to see this motley assembly of four thousand vagrant football supporters pass rapidly through a sequence of identities: that it would become a crowd, then a violent crowd, then a very violent crowd at a speed that was far faster than anything I had witnessed before.

  The first step in any crowd, the essential a priori choice by the potential members of it, is this: will we, as individuals, choose to cease being individuals and become a crowd? It sounds contrived, put so explicity, but the choice is always an intensely conscious one.

  This was how that moment was experienced in Cagliari.

  Everyone was ready for something to happen, expected it. There wasn’t a supporter among the four thousand who did not know about the six o’clock march. By five forty-five, most people had gathered in front of the railway station, which was crowded now and active with a low, steady buzz that seemed to come from the same concentrated whisper. There wasn’t a single person among those who had been crushed together on the taxi rank who was now sitting. Everyone was up—and ready. I wandered round the square, and the people I met hissed: ‘You know, don’t you?’ They had stopped using the word ‘march’ or mentioning the time, as if talking about what they wanted to do might prevent it from happening.

  And then when six o’clock came: nothing.

  I heard distant church bells ringing the hour—it was that quiet—and when they were finished: nothing.

  I looked for Mutton-chops, but couldn’t find him. Everyone was looking at everyone else, waiting. A whole minute elapsed, slowly. A second minute: nothing. And then somebody—someone I didn’t recognize and who didn’t seem to be known by the others—stepped out into the main street. He stepped out conspicuously, in a manner that said: the march will now commence. He strutted bravely into the Via Roma and stopped. There was a problem: no one had joined him. He hesitated and turned round quickly—right, left, right—looking for the others: they weren’t there. And then a choice was made: two others joined him, friends it seemed, who had been behind him but inhibited from taking the first step. They then stopped and looked round, panicky. No one had followed them. Their faces knotted up in sudden anxiety; their faces said: What have we just done?—as if they had done something exceptionally reckless or brave, although the only thing they had done was something exceptionally lucky: they had walked into the middle of a busy street and not been knocked down by a bus.

  I thought: Perhaps the march at six o’clock will be three nervous friends standing in the middle of the Via Roma.

  Everyone was watching, everyone except the police who did not—it was obvious by now—know what was going on. They hadn’t noticed that three English supporters were standing in the middle of a busy street, unable to cross it. The police, gathered in clusters, were chatting, not bothered. The match was three hours away.

  Then two others stepped out, equally deliberate. Like the three friends, they did not say a thing, which suddenly I found peculiar. No one was singing ‘Here we go’. There were no chants for England. No one had shouted, Come on, lads—if only to urge the others to follow. It was quiet.

  Three others stepped out. And then two more. And then five. And then suddenly: everybody. Spontaneous consent. Hundreds and hundreds at once. People crowded through the doors of the railway station—so many that they were having to squeeze through, with others pushing behind them—and people came down the little streets from up the hill, and others came rushing up from behind, from the port area. Everyone moved at once.

  The threshold had been crossed—not by a leader but by the willed consent of everyone there.

  The next stage was characterized by a powerful sense of achievement. A crowd had been made by the people who had stepped into the street, and everyone was aware of what they had done; it was a creative act. Obvious metaphors apply: the members of the crowd were both the crowd and its creators; they were clay and potter, stone and sculptor, voice and music. They had made something out of themselves.

  This, too—this sense of crowd—was achieved at a remarkable speed, within seconds of the ‘march’ commencing.

  The estimated number of English supporters that day was small, but now, with four thousand supporters packed into one street, the number seemed very large. It might have been more than four thousand. I knew only that, with most of the crowd behind me, I was unable to see the front: the street was too densely packed.

  This crowd—this new entity, no longer ‘they’ but ‘it’—filled the Via Roma and the pavement alongside it, trapping cars, buses and lorries in place, just as Mutton-chops had predicted. The crowd, sure of itself, was moving quickly. It walked past the international news kiosk, where Mutton-chops would have bought his Daily Express, past the arcades and one of the bars where I had been the night before. It entered the main intersection, where four or five policemen, the only ones in sight, were huddled defensively, standing behind a car, and then divided up, into several lines, each one moving between the narrow traffic corridors: you had to twist your hips to avoid knocking the car mirrors—or even cigarettes, held out of the windows; Italians were on motor bikes and mopeds, and you had to be mindful of their feet. Here were the hooligans inglesi, thousands of them, on the very day of the Holland match, marching through the streets, as everyone had said they would, as everyone had feared, but the actual people in the streets—exposed, vulnerable—were not even rolling up their car windows. Many were laughing.

  Who was around me? In front was a lad and his girl-friend. He was stocky, flab flopping in his T-shirt, and she, also quite chunky, wore a loose-fitting pink blouse—possibly silk—and pink-framed spectacles that, as she was josded around, kept falling down her nose which was wet with perspiration. He had his arm around her shoulder, shielding her. This was her first football match—the look was unmistakable—and he was manifestly pleased to be intr
oducing her to an experience that was so intensely felt. They were smiling, foolishly, unnecessarily; they were experiencing joy.

  Everyone was experiencing some kind of foolish joy. Next to me was a lad covered in tattoos. I had spoken to him earlier and stuck close by him now; I wanted to look as if I belonged. And then it occurred to me: no one belonged. No one knew anyone else. The others near me: they were from anywhere, everywhere. They were all strangers. This march was a march of strangers. More to the point: this march was a march. It recalled not football crowds, but demonstrations or protest rallies. You could see the surprise in the faces of the people near me; they had created something big, but weren’t sure how they had done it.

  The march reached the end of the square, and it was only then that I saw the police, jogging behind three armoured personnel carriers. Each vehicle was being driven fast, so that people had to jump out of the way or be run over. The vehicles accelerated and stopped and then lurched forward again. I thought that the police would also be at the front by now—somebody must be calling back the bus-loads I had seen earlier—but no attempt had been made to direct the march or stop it.

  This phase of the crowd—this happy, happy phase—lasted for about four minutes. During these minutes, everyone, myself included, felt the pleasure of belonging, not unlike the pleasure of being liked or loved. There was another pleasure at work as well, one derived from power, even though the power had not been exercised, even though it was only the potential of power: the power of a crowd that had taken over a city.

  The next stage—the first lawless stage—also happened quickly, although not so cleanly. It was achieved in starts, stops, restarts. Again, a threshold had to be crossed, but it was one of a different kind.

  A flat-bed lorry appeared, a television crew in the back filming. As it passed, photographers jumped on board. Photographers were everywhere, their heavy, brightly-coloured press tags swinging from their necks. Six or seven photographers had clustered on the steps of a hotel, shooting as the crowd approached. One, to get closer, walked down the steps, but the crowd hissed and chanted—the first chant; a crude fuck-off-press chant—and I thought that the photographer would be set upon. The anger surprised me—spontaneous and unanimous. The photographer scurried back, with two supporters chasing him half-way up the steps. I was grateful that I wasn’t carrying proper press credentials. It was the only threatening behaviour I had seen.

  Crowd barriers had been set across the street, but they were lifted up in a matter-of-fact way and pushed over to the side. The street was widening and I sprinted along the pavement, working my way closer to the front. I spotted three Dutch supporters getting out of a car, the first ones I had seen. They watched the crowd for a moment, realized what it was and ran. No one followed.

  And then, the pace, brisk from the start, accelerated noticeably, and the acceleration sent a message—something was happening, something that mustn’t be missed. There was a feeling of agitation, and I was watchful, curious to see how this message would be received. The crowd’s future behaviour depended on how it now responded: I knew this; everyone knew this. The pace quickened, deliberately, self-consciously, and then quickened further and suddenly there was space around me and everyone was running. I also recognized this run; I had seen its kind endlessly; I had seen one only a few weeks before, the night before the Cup Final, when several hundred United supporters—not expecting trouble, not wanting it, police in pairs on every corner—suddenly saw something. It didn’t matter what it was. Beer glasses were dropped, a terrible crash, and everyone was gone, even though no one knew what he was running after.

  No one, here, knew what he was running after. If I had been lifted magically out of my cramped, crushed space and dropped near the front, I would have found nothing to have provoked this crowd of English lads, no matter how hot-blooded, into sprinting down the street as though in pursuit—no Dutch supporter or hostile Italian youth or belligerent policeman. They were in pursuit, but in pursuit of nothing. Within a span of seconds, four thousand strangers were overwhelmed by the urge to chase nothing—except, possibly, an intention. An alarm had been sounded, a call to urgency, the irresistible call to be a different kind of crowd. A march walks; a march does not run. The moment this crowd started running the march was finished.

  But then, as abruptly, it stopped. I crashed into the person ahead of me; others crashed into me. So, there were police in the front after all. I lifted myself up off someone’s shoulder to have a look. There were police, but not many. Two hundred, maybe more. They had riot helmets and rifles, and had formed a line to hold back the crowd, which although crushed up against it, was still pushing forward. If the police expected to maintain order they would have to contain the crowd now, diffuse the signal that had been conveyed by that sudden run.

  People continued pushing, not the ones in front, pressed up against the rifle barrels held across the policemen’s chests, but everyone else behind them. I was lifted—my feet left the ground—and carried forward, and there was a surge, everyone surging, and the police line broke apart. It came tumbling down. I fell, the people around me fell, the policemen fell. The march had disintegrated. I understood what had happened and, in my cynical self-interest, was grateful.

  The next stage was, if not the most important, certainly the most daring. The crowd was about to become a violent one, but, unusually, its violence would be directed against the police. All violent crowds destroy the codes of civilized conduct; but, as was apparent with the United fans jogging up the High Road to Tottenham, few crowds go so far as to attack the institution that enforces those codes.

  The police and supporters had got quickly to their feet and stood opposite each other, separated by a small intersection. Behind the police was the Hotel Mediterraneano, filled with journalists and photographers, many now gathered by the door, about to take some of the very pictures that I would see on the front pages of the papers on sale at the airport in the morning. Behind the supporters was a building site and a dirt car park. And there they stood: despite the preparations, there were only two or three hundred police, and they were looking uneasy and bewildered. The police looked young and inexperienced, uncertain in their use of their rifles, which seemed to frighten them as much as they frightened me and which they appeared to be proposing to use as clubs, holding the barrel in one hand and the butt in the other. There were probably fewer supporters now—in the run, some must have fallen away—but still a large number: two thousand, possibly three. It was as if a line had been drawn in the dirt, and the supporters were urging the police to cross it. The supporters were shouting at the police—Come on, they were saying, come on—dropping their hands to their sides, dropping their guard, the familiar street-fighting gesture.

  With the world’s media bearing down on them, the supporters wanted to take on an island militia that had been preparing for this event for months. The lads wanted to fight the police. For a brief moment, I was able to stand back from what I was witnessing, remove myself from the threat and the adrenalin and the excitement of it all, and reflect: Are not adults a marvel to watch?

  One of the lads—understanding, as everyone did, that this was a pivotal moment—decided to offer himself up as the leader that it appeared that the crowd needed. The outcome was interesting to witness.

  He was a big lad—all shoulders and neck, with a jagged and crooked face like bad plumbing. He had cropped hair, cut so brutally close that it was nothing more than a fuzzy shadow across the rough, bulging contours of his skull. I would not want to be blocking his path, which, surely to their regret, the Italian policemen ended up having to do.

  His intention, with everyone facing each other, was to burst through the police line, leading the supporters behind him. He put down his head, and, shouting, ‘Come on, England,’ ran straight ahead. He was much bigger than the Italians and came crashing past them. He knocked one policeman down with his forearm, swinging it straight into his face, and pushed over several others. A policeman
grabbed at him from behind, but the lad turned and threw him to the ground. It was an impressive physical effort—there was a lot of deep grunting—and then he broke through the line, stumbled slightly, recovered his balance and threw his hands up in the air like an athlete. He looked behind him as though expecting applause. There was no applause. Nor were there any people nearby. The big lad had thought that the other supporters would follow. He was wrong. His face collapsed in a look of bewilderment and betrayal and then he was pulled to the ground by the police—fifteen, possibly twenty—who immediately surrounded him. He disappeared under their blows, squirming at their feet.

  So: it didn’t happen. But the moment wasn’t far off. There was more to-ing and fro-ing and a lot of dust. And then I saw the most extraordinary thing: it was a hand-gun being held in the air by one of the officers (the natty little cap, the elegantly cut jacket). It was fired—there was one shot, a second and a third—and moments later there was the sweet, sharp smell of gunpowder.

  It was six twenty-three. Within twenty minutes, there had been a peaceful march of several thousand people, followed by a disturbance that almost became a riot but never quite managed to be one, and now the firing of a gun.

  I had never been in a crowd in which people were firing guns. I didn’t like it. The supporters didn’t like it either. The one near me responded by lifting a large stone over his head and dropping it through the windscreen of a car, and the sound of the glass collapsing was loud and surprising. I swung round on hearing it—incredulous that the reply to a gun’s being fired was to destroy property, when I saw that the others were doing the same. As everyone was pushed back into the dirt car park, they availed themselves of the material at hand—the stones on the ground and the windscreens of the cars parked there—until someone decided that throwing stones at the policemen would be more gratifying: why destroy property when you can hurt a real person instead? It was an inspired moment, until some other, even more inspired youth, started throwing tear-gas canisters as well.